Couriers, delivery and transportation companies need to determine the best route from an origin, such as a distribution center or a pick up point, to a destination, such as a delivery address. Currently, these organizations use navigation software and navigation databases to plan a route from the origin to the destination. For operations involving large trucks, several commercial databases are available which include information that enhances route planning. For example, a database may include roadway information such as weight bearing capacity, speed limit, and the presence of absence of dedicated turn lanes, among other information.
Commercially available route planning software and databases may lack certain types of information and/or route planning functionalities. For example, in many circumstances the destination is not located along a roadway included in the database, but instead the actual destination is located a mile or more from the “destination” stored in the database. This problem has come to be known within the transportation industry as the “last mile” problem.
Many times, a driver or vehicle operator nearing the actual destination encounters a problem that is not accounted for in the database. Because of the lack of information for the final portion of the route, many less precise and subjective methods have been developed in an effort to determine the navigability of the “last mile” of the route. These methods may include a subjective analysis of secondary attributes, such as, for example analyzing the Department of Transportation road classification, analyzing the name of the road (e.g. whether the road is a “Boulevard” or a “Lane”), analyzing the depiction of the route on a map (e.g. whether the route appears as a heavy line as opposed to a thin line), etc. Nevertheless, the approach described above does not always produce reliable results and may plan a route with sections which are impassable by certain vehicles. Additional techniques may be desired to determine if the “last mile” of a route is likely to be suitable for a particular vehicle.